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View 413 May 8 - 14, 2006

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Monday May 8, 2006

The column is done. I can turn some attention to the rest of the world.

There is considerable mail, both today and over the weekend. Chaos Manor is in a worse state of chaos than usual, although it's fairly normal for the day after the column deadline.

Lisabetta my TabletPC is fully restored to duty; the story makes up much of the column. The first episode ought to be posted sometime today on www.byte.com .

Some notes that didn't get into the column:

Someone recommended Copernicus Desktop as a search program. I tried it, and discovered to my horror that with that installed I could no longer make copies of outlook.pst, even though I had closed Outlook and rebooted the computer.  Uninstalling Copernicus ended that problem. I fear that being unable to back up the key file on the communications machine is too high a price for running what was a pretty good program.

T-Mobile seems to be offering more cell phone services. I use T-Mobile for WiFi hot spot access, but it now looks as if T-Mobile may be able to do a lot more at a reasonable price.

===========

Apparently a judge is going to forbid California to have an exit exam for a high school diploma on the grounds that the schools aren't equal and therefore===

I was about to write something incendiary, but I won't.

 

 

 

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Tuesday, May 9, 2006   

  E3 is on today but I won't be there. On the other hand, I will be at the press event tonight at the Merchandising Center.

There's a LOT of good mail, including a new press release from Swift in the Gulf, and just a lot of short shrift stuff of some importance.

=======

Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=674042006

 Roland Dobbins

=======

And here is some fascinating news:

U.S. tipping Mexico to Minuteman patrols.

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_3799653

--- Roland Dobbins

Imperialism in action: we know what is best for you, and we will do what we want to do, and we do not care what the citizens think. We are smarter than you are.

I have to keep telling myself that the solution to border problems is NOT to elect Open Border Democrats.

And if we do enforce the laws the Courts will step in.

So: the judges will stop us from enforcing standards of education, and from enforcing the borders. I refrain from the obvious comments. Perhaps Jefferson will suffice? The Tree of Liberty is THIRSTY.

================

 

 

 

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Wednesday,  May 10, 2006

I need to figure out how to partition the archive.pst file. It has become enormous, and takes too long to copy, and since Outlook opens it each time it opens, it gets a new date. What I want is to partition it into a chunk that will not be opened and closed by Outlook and thus will not be updated, and a more current archive that is treated in the usual way. In other words, a "deep archive" and an archive.

 

It would help if Outlook had any kind of "viewer" or translator so that one could examine .pst files and see just what the heck is in them.

I am sure all this is simple stuff for Outlook experts, but it's driving me nuts. The problem is that archive.pst has grown to 2.5 GB, and it takes a LONG time (over 8 minutes) to copy it from one computer to another over a 100 MB/second net (my older TabletPC only does 10/100). For that matter it's not fast at 1000 MB. Since I usually copy the whole Outlook folder to the TabletPC when I am about to go on the road, I don't really want to have to copy the archive file each time I do that.

Suggestions?  There has to be some way to partition all that stuff into active and truly archived files, but I don't know what that is.

-===========

Well, they went to school, got good grades, can't pass a 9th grade level test, but they are entitled to a high school diploma. The lawyers and courts have spoken, and everyone is demonstrating.

The thing to do is issue diplomas a birth. Then employers can go back to using job skills and IQ tests for hiring since all will have the "credentials".

Entitled to a diploma, without regard to ability or skill or having learned anything.

And we want to export democracy to the world.

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.

The Tree of Liberty is THIRSTY.

================

I have a whole bunch of mail taking me to task for using Ross Perot's phrase in the debate "I'm all ears" in commenting about him. It wasn't malicious. He said it of himself to good effect in one of the debates, back when he was a -- to me at least -- credible candidate for President of these United States. A candidate I supported, in fact. Truth in advertising: I was asked by a firm what worked for Perot to help plan implementation of some of the measures described in Take Back Your Government. I was never paid, but it was understood that I would be if the campaign was successful. And of course I wrote the introduction and notes to Take Back Your Government.

From Wikipedia:

One reason Perot was so much more successful than typical third-party candidates was that he was allowed to participate in all three debates. At one point in June Perot led the polls with 39% (versus 31% for Bush and 25% for Clinton). Just prior to the debates, Perot received 7-9% support in nationwide polls (a level that would not have met the new standard of 15% imposed by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates in 2000); it is therefore likely that the debates played a significant role in his ultimate receipt of 19% of the popular vote. Although his answers during the debates were general, Perot's wit, folkisms, and straight talking were so impressive that even many Democrats and Republicans conceded that Perot won at least the first debate.

One question Perot was continually asked was whether he, as an independent, could govern.

Perot responded:

"Can we govern? . . . I love that one. The 'we' is you and me. You bet your hat we can govern because we will be there together and we will figure out what to do and you won't tolerate gridlock, you won't tolerate endless meandering and wandering around, and you won't tolerate non-performance. And believe me, anybody that knows me understand I have a very low tolerance for non-performance also. Together we can get anything done."

Then he imploded. I have often wondered just what happened. Suddenly he seemed irrational; he had not been so before. I had truly hoped that he would build a new party along the lines of Heinlein's Take Back Your Government (to which I wrote the introduction). I had a peripheral involvement with the campaign until it came apart. Bush had eliminated all the Reagan people (at least all those I knew) when he took office, so I didn't have much residual loyalty in that direction.

Perot opposed our first imperialist adventure in Iraq, as had I. I am quite certain that had he become President he would not have encouraged revolts against Saddam, then leave the rebels hung out to dry. I am convinced that guilt for that action had and has great influence on Bush II; as indeed it does on me. We left many friends to face the music in Viet Nam; our actions in Iraq after Gulf I were inexcusable; and we certainly need to plan on what to do to protect those who cooperated with us in Iraq this time if we cut and run.

Precisely what happened to Perot I do not know, but his campaign came apart, and he became obsessively paranoid. There are those who believe that his paranoia was justified. I don't know. I know little about real conspiracies in the US. I do know something about how covert operations have worked in other places. See Indonesia and the abortive communist uprising for an illustrative example. If you can find good sources on Cuber and the original Bay of Pigs plan as opposed to what Kennedy approved, that might be instructive as well. I have heard stories about Perot and the threats to his family and such like, but I haven't heard anything that isn't common knowledge. I do know that he was a great disappointment; perhaps the last chance we had to restore normal politics to the Republic.

In any event, my remark about his being "all ears" was taken directly from one of his own statements in one of his more successful moments in the debates.

===================

ON OUTLOOK:

I have a pile of older Outlook archives on another computer (Anastasia, which used to be the communications machine). That, it turns out, is why my archives file, huge as it is, still doesn't seem to have the old email. That, I think, is on another machine.

I am uncertain about what Microsoft Index does. If I put the old archive files into an Outlook folder here (but NOT the one that Outlook itself looks for pst files in) will those be indexed by the Microsoft Windows Desktop search function or must they have been opened by Outlook first? I begin to think what I must do is wait until a day when I have all day, import all those files into Outlook, then sort them into annual archive files, and finally close them in Outlook so it won't be opening those each time. This is really more complicated than it ought to be, but I do seem to be on the trail of finding ways to automate...

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Thursday, May 11, 2006

Illegal aliens have rights. War memorials do not, and a Federal judge has ordered that the War Memorial Cross in San Diego be torn down.

Judges question California's Convicted Sex Offender registration act. A judge holds that those who go to high school are entitled to a diploma and should not be required to take an 8th grade competency test in order to get one.

"There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide," said John Adams. Apparently I get to live in the era of the fulfillment of his observation. Welcome to anarcho tyranny.

Meanwhile the intelligence mess continues. And no one knows what to do about Iran. How could we?

===============

My Outlook.pst  problem goes back a long way, and it is going to take a good bit of effort to straighten things out.

What I have is a bunch of computers, each with its own set of .pst files. Many have the names of current files but they are not the same. Some go back many years. Some don't.

Clearly what must be done is this: Using Anastasia, the previous communications system, I am making an Outlook folder into which I am copying, under the folder name OldComputerName/Outlook, every pst files I can find. This will take a while. That will include copying all of Anastasia's .pst files into Anastasia/Outlook. Then I will shut down Outlook on Alexis and copy the current .pst files from Alexis (the current communications machine) over to Documents and Settings etc., etc., where Windows wants to store the current .pst files that Outlook works with.

I will then disconnect Anastasia from the network. Entirely. Working off line I will import every single .pst file I can find, starting with the most recent and going back to the most elderly, telling it to ignore duplicates.  That should get everything into a bunch of .pst files of one kind or another.

Then I will export things into folders with some logic to them. Then I'll organize the current .pst file (more or less as it is now) and send it back to Alexis, and copy all those closed but organized .pst files to Alexis and to safety placed, make DVD's of all this mess, and I should be done once and for all. I should then have .pst files organized by years, which I can open if I need them but usually leave them closed.

That's one thing to do.

A second action item, which I am going to do as soon as I have time, is convert from POP3 to IMAP. Zidane, my ISP, supports that, I've got help in figuring it out, and that should solve my On The Road email problems forever. At least I can hope so. Then it won't matter which laptop I carry on the road.

==========

This seems to be in the news:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12707280/from/ET/

I have ionic filters. I don't know about ozone but they sure do remove a lot of particles. Not sure whether to turn them off or not.

==============

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday, May 12, 2006

Niven and I are on the way to Stanford tomorrow for the Singularity conference http://sss.stanford.edu/ . I'd have said more about it earlier, but Roland discovered that the tickets were on stand by a couple of weeks ago, so there wasn't much point in announcing it. Anyway, we are headed out in the morning.

======

I have George Noory (Art Bell's succcessor) on. Richard Hoagland, the Coast to Coast Science Advisor, has just told us that the US has recorded every singe telephone call since 2001; we have electro-gravitic spacecraft; there is a Secret Astronaut program, and the open Astronauts are either dupes or patriots flying junk like the Shuttle, while the real program uses the anti-gravity ships; and there are these enormous (7 km cube) structures on the Moon. Apparently we don't need a new space program. We have one. The government is hiding it. Noory says his mind just didn't want to believe this, but...

They are also telling us that a fourth astronaut died in the fire with Grissom, Chaffee, and White. He was a Secret Astronaut so that death was suppressed (they would have had to explain who he was and what he was doing there). The official version http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/AS01/a01sum.htm never mentions this fourth guy, nor why the rescue crew didn't see his body. Nor why a Secret Astronaut, who would be part of the anti-gravity space program, would be in a very badly designed oxygen over-pressure experiment in a capsule that was going up on a rocket.

After all, we have had anti-gravity since the 50's, apparently. Apparently Hoagland has learned a lot since he was one of Walter Kronkheit's advisors back in Apollo days, and when I knew him as a science correspondent back during the JPL probes to Mars and Jupiter and beyond.

"But why do we no longer read anything about anti-gravity research in the aviation journals? Why that proves it! We already have it. You won't see anything in Aviation Week about anti-gravity research because we already have it." And Area 51 is all involved with it.

I guess all this rocket research is a big waste of time. Energy research too: if we have anti-gravity then we certainly have neither energy nor metallic resource problems, for reasons I explained in A Step Farther Out. So that solves most of mankind's problems, if we can just get the politicians to stop suppressing all this knowledge and let us know what we are really capable of.

Ah well.

===========

Oh. Wow! Mars has 600 million inhabitants. And they know about it at JPL, too. Or maybe they don't. The head of the Mariner program doesn't even know about some of the Mars pictures. Well, it will be an interesting world when all comes out.

And now I have learned that my old friend Bob Bussard was working for Edward Teller to develop faster than light travel, but he wasn't able to bring that off. I think I have learned all I can handle tonight.

 

===========

In any event, I will put up a bit of mail and turn in. I won't be on again until tomorrow night.

==============

Safely in Palo Alto after a very productive drive up. Dinner in a few minutes.

==============

And have a look at this and tell me what it means. I sure don't know:

Subject: Science Blog - Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it Goes ... Backwards?

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/lights-most-exotic-trick
-yet-so-fast-it-goes-backwards-10590.html

Mike

It may be a temporary effect of a long trip, but I do not understand this one...

 

 

 

 

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Saturday, May 13, 2006

All day conference on AI at Stanford. Lunch with Eric Drexler. Coffee with John McCarthy. Dinner with Doug Hofstadter.

Long drive home with Niven.

 

 

 

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

Mother's Day

Home safe.

 Three of the boys came home to take mother to brunch.

 

 

 

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